Tag: capitalism

Billionaires Should Exist

Billionaires aren’t the problem—rigged systems are. In any fair economy with risk and a healthy dose of luck, outliers will emerge. The challenge isn’t to erase them but to hold them accountable: fair taxes, honest competition, and reinvestment in the people who made them rich. That’s stewardship, not socialism.

(Version 1.3)

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars,” she wasn’t wrong to name exploitation. But she was wrong to name every fortune that way. The line lands because populism is simple — and it targets people for hatred. Naming an enemy works. It always has. But if you’re serious about justice, you can’t build it on resentment. Billionaires should exist for one simple reason: in any fair system that includes a healthy dose of luck, they inevitably will.

The Game Is Capitalism

If I play a game, I play to win. I learn the rules, find the META[1], and compete to excel.

Capitalism is an amoral, not immoral, economic system. It doesn’t reward goodness or fairness; it rewards ownership of leverage, scale, and speed. That means we can — and must — bend it toward moral ends rather than cede the field to the greedy and rent-seeking. If you leave a game to the worst players, don’t be surprised when they corrupt it.

A honest game works for everyone. Practically speaking this means ownership should be as widespread as possible. The system works for who it’s supposed to work for: owners. Everyone benefits.[2]

Where AOC Is Right — and Wrong

She’s right that some billionaires got there through extraction — underpaying labor, gaming laws, hoarding rents. That’s theft by another name. But she’s wrong to pretend that’s the whole story. Some fortunes come from creation: innovation, coordination, risk-taking, with, it must be said, a healthy dose of luck. In any fair system that contains risk and randomness, outliers will emerge. Sometimes spectacularly so.

Jay-Z, for example, parlayed his monopoly on his enormous talent (and his wife Beyoncé) into a billionaire power couple. What wages did he steal? What worker collective should he establish? What about Steven Spielberg? Or Oprah? And so on. Workers are the lynchpin here and that leads me to my next point.

The Moral Obligation of Winners

When capitalism’s winners forget the social fabric that sustains them — schools, roads, courts, labor, consumers — the system curdles into rot. Politics becomes ugly and bad things can happen. They need to remember that social fabric consists of people who have voluntarily made them rich. So they should show gratitude — and afford that fabric fair taxes in proportion to the public goods they enjoy: living wages so full-time work leads to a full life, honest competition instead of monopoly or captured regulation, and reinvestment in the communities that raised your markets and your workers.

That’s not socialism. That’s stewardship. Leadership not rule.

The Progressive Error

Progressives too often confuse moral critique with moral condemnation. Ideals are twisted into ideology. They attack wealth itself which is both a blessing and responsibility instead of the unjust systems that distort it. The result is they drive away good people who would play on their team. If you vacate the field, you don’t purify the world — you forfeit it.

Their moral task shouldn’t be to wish capitalism away; it’s to discipline it — to aim its power at human flourishing instead of greed. That’s how you beat the game: not by quitting, but by outplaying the immoral within it.

The World I Want

I want a world where billionaires exist because they earned it justly — through ingenuity, creativity, service, and the courage to take real risks. I want a capitalism worthy of human dignity — one that lifts as it climbs and measures success by how many lives rise with yours.

The trick isn’t to stop billionaires from existing (as if you could) — it’s to police them so they don’t rig the system for their special benefit. That means taxing fairly so wealth contributes to the society that made it possible, curbing monopolies to keep markets open and innovation alive, and limiting political influence so money can’t purchase democracy. The goal is not to eliminate winners. It’s to keep the game honest.[3]

If I play a game, I play to win. The difference is, I know what winning should look like: a world where success uplifts rather than devours.

  1. Gamerspeak for Most Efficient Tactics Available. ↩︎

  2. How is more a discussion for another post. ↩︎

  3. The Nordics are examples of societies where there are more billionaires per capita than the United States but also have the highest unionization rates in the world. Embarrassing facts for ideologues across all stripes of our political spectrum. ↩︎

Capitalism I Believe In

Nancy Folbre: Shared Capitalism – NYTimes.com:

Legend has it that Bob Montgomery, a left-leaning economist at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1950s, was once asked if he believed in private property.

“I certainly do,” he said. “I believe in it so much I think everyone in the state of Texas should have some.”

It’s such an ecumenical line that President George W. Bush used it to good effect in a 2004 speech. The basic idea begs for extension: If capitalists are so great, shouldn’t everybody be one?

The term “shared capitalism” is a catchall for a variety of arrangements that businesses can make to share profits with a large number of employees, whether through stock ownership or incentive pay based on company performance.

(Via Economix.)

That Old Time Capitalism

I began reading John C. Bogle‘s The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism tonight. So far, it’s an interesting read.

I began reading John C. Bogle‘s The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism tonight. So far, it’s an interesting read. Here is a memorable quote (so far) rich with irony in today’s world:

My vantage point is that of an American businessman (and a lifelong Republican) who has spent his entire half-century-plus career in the financial field…For better or worse, my youthful idealism–the belief that any truly sound business endeavor must be built on a strong moral foundation–still remains today, at least as strong as it was all those years ago.

By the latter years of the twentieth century, our business values had eroded to a remarkable extent. Yes, we are a nation of prodigious energy, marvelous entrepreneurship, brilliant technology, creativity beyond imagination, and, at least in some corners of the business world, the idealism to make our nation and our world a better place. But I also see far too much greed, egoism, materialism, and waste to please my critical eye. I see an economy overly focused on the “haves” and not focused enough on the “have-nots,” failing to allocate our nation’s resources where they are most needed–to solve the problems of poverty and to provide quality education for all. I see a shocking misuse of the world’s natural resources, as if they were ours to waste rather than ours to preserve as a sacred trust for future generations, and I see a political system corrupted by the staggering infusion of money that is, to be blunt about it, rarely given by disinterested citizens who expect no return on their investment.

Wow. Small wonder why he isn’t all that popular with today’s so-called conservatives.